This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by
focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later
reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). It highlights the similarities, both in mindset and
behavior, between the two stories’ devious and deranged first-person narrators, whose actions result
in the death of a fellow human being. It further discusses the narrators’ fear and refusal of their own
mortality, which finds expression in their hostility, and barely contained revulsion against a man (in
“The Tell-Tale Heart”) and a woman (in “The Aspern Papers”), whose principal defining traits are
old age and physical decay.
